​Zip’s parents hated each other, but they refused to get a divorce. Another thing they refused to do was use birth control. Zip was their fifth child, and by that point his parents had quit even trying to come up with names, which is how he wound up Zachary Taylor Chase.

“The most fucked up thing in my childhood was the way we went through pets,” Zip told me once as we waited for our food to arrive at Thai Restaurant, our favorite Thai restaurant.

At the front of the restaurant, palm-sized silver fish swam fin-to-fin in an endless slow arc around their cramped aquarium.

“My dad spent most of his time at work,” said Zip. “There, or the bar, or his girlfriend’s place. He avoided our house like it was radioactive, because it only took ten minutes at home to get in a fight with my mom.”

I’d skipped breakfast that morning. My stomach was beginning to turn on itself.

“He sounds like a piece of shit,” I said.

“That’s what he was afraid we’d think,” said Zip, “so he kept bringing home puppies, for the kids, trying to make us like him.”

I sipped my water.

“My mom hated that,” said Zip. “She was already raising six kids by herself, and she didn’t like animals to begin with. Plus these dogs were, like, a representation of my dad. So she never lifted a finger to take care of them. Three of them ran away, two others got hit by cars, and another one died in our backyard because she refused to take him to the vet.”

“Jesus.”

“And we were just kids. God, it was awful.”

“He could at least have gotten you fish, or something.”

“Oh, he did that too. We had fish for a while. Keeping fish alive is legitimately impossible, though.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t feed a fish for a couple of days and it’ll die. But if you feed it too much, that’ll kill it too.”

“It’s like those pandas at the zoo,” I said. “The ones they can’t convince to mate. You’ve got pandas that don’t want to reproduce, fish that eat so much it kills them… isn’t evolution supposed to weed that out?”

“I don’t think fish even want to be alive,” said Zip. “If the water’s too cold, too hot, too acidic, too basic — any excuse they find, they’ll pounce on it and die, and then when you find them floating at the top of the tank they give you that look, like it’s your fault—”

He puffed his cheeks out, widened his eyes, and furrowed his eyebrows.

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s a reproachful fish, right there.”

Zip bought a pug puppy when his first paycheck came through. His apartment didn’t even have furniture at that point. He was sleeping on a pile of blankets on the carpet. Getting a dog was priority number one.

He named the puppy Chomper. Chomper was a big fan of me, so much so that he lost control of his bladder every time I visited. At first Zip found this hilarious, but by the sixth or seventh time he was exasperated.

“Can we just stop coming to my place?” he suggested, grabbing a roll of paper towels off the top of the fridge. “Can’t you buy your own damn copy of Mario Kart?”

“I only play video games with you,” I said, although in truth I just liked Chomper. He was running figure eights through my legs, so I leaned down to scratch him behind the ears.

“You’re a good boy,” I told Chomper, whose little pink tongue drooped happily out of his mouth.

“Don’t say that,” said Zip. “You’ll just encourage him.”

Even Li liked Chomper, and she hated dogs.

Whenever Zip went on an expedition, he left Chomper with his sister. The first thing he always did when he returned was drop by her place to retrieve him.

The worst part of watching Zip vanish into the pit in the forest was knowing that he’d never go pick up his dog from his sister’s house.

I turned to Li.

“We’re going after him,” I said.

“Of course,” said Li.

A few months earlier I’d run into Sergeant Rivers at a bar near RangerCorp headquarters. We traded stories, and I remembered the one about his eye. After a few drinks I asked Rivers if he thought he’d made the right decision by trying to save his partner.

Rivers tightened his lips and rubbed the rim of his empty eye socket.

“The smart thing to do,” he said, “is not always the right thing to do.”